Lipstick as in https://github.com/nemomobile/lipstick?

You could try building it, including the example-home (https://github.com/nemomobile/lipstick-example-home/) and then run it and see what happens.

Have you done that already?

If that works, then you would just need to run this instad of hildon-desktop.

But honestly, I don't know what exactly this lipstick does and how compatible if may be with Maemo (I assume you still want to be able to open programs, see notifications, etc.)